Thanksgiving Is Backwards, Shouldn´t It Be GivingThanks?

We have a tradition in my family. When I was a kid, Thanksgiving was always at my grandparents Arlene and Milt´s house in Palm Springs, land of cousin pillow fight wars. We would gather once a year at the long oval shaped glass table, and each person would say one thing he or she was grateful for.

I live in a family of criers. It´s beautifully true. We´re a bunch of saps, every one of us. You can go through the archives of all of our Thanksgivings, and you won´t find one where at least a couple people haven´t shed tears during this ceremony. My mom, especially, always impresses us, usually by forming tears in her eyes before she can even get a word out.

I´m happy to say that I´m fulfilling the family birthright. As I sit here writing this, I can feel the tears filling up my eyes. It´s my first Thanksgiving away from home, and I´m not just away from home, I´m thousands of miles away, in a different time zone and a different language. I didn´t quite realize how special and crazy that is until just right now, I think.

Today my family is going to gather in our house in San Diego. My grandpa Milt, tall lanky grandpa Milt, died several years ago. So now we gather in San Diego, some new family members, some of them still pooping in diapers (we´re all hoping my brother Adam will move past this phase soon). And everyone will go around to say something they´re grateful for, and tears will be shed, and people will leave the table uncomfortably full. Ah, the beauty of traditions.

I hadn´t even thought about continuing the tradition from down here until this morning, when I received a beautiful email from Kalen, with 5 things she was grateful for. And when she asked me, I was amazed to watch all the things pouring out of me. So here are a couple things I´m grateful for....

1. I´m grateful for you, every single one of you. You are all on this list serve because you´ve formed the fabric of my life. You have all impacted me in ways that stun me. You have all taught me, shown me compassion and love. You have all blessed my life in some way, and for that I am truly grateful.

2. I´m grateful for the tears that keep trying to get out, but I tell them, I won´t cry in the Windsor Elementary School computer lab where I help teach English. Those tears are little liquidy reminders of home, of everything I left and love so much back up in the northern hemisphere. To be able to miss something is a beautiful thing.

3. I´m grateful for my family. I´m grateful for growing up in a loving home, where my dad threw me groundballs everynight in the living room, focusing on my backhand, where my mom asked me every day how school went and cared and endured years where I didn´t feel like sharing, I´m grateful to my sister for always making me feel like I was special even when I didn´t feel like it, I´m grateful to my brother for taking me to costa rica and showing me the joy of exploring the world, for sharing his wisdom and flatulence with me. To my loving grandparents, cousins who hid beanie babies and played red indian, aunts and uncles who always respond to my emails. To everyone.

4. I´m grateful for the struggles. I´m grateful for being made fun of as a kid, for feeling like I didn´t belong, for this semester which has been one of the biggest ups and downs of my life. There´s a quote by Richard Bach that says, "I gave my life to become the person I am today. Was it worth it?" I´m grateful to be able to say yes, thank you, I love who I am.

5. I´m grateful for forgiveness. I´m grateful that my family sat around the couch a couple months ago and had an honest, loving conversation about everything going on. I´m grateful that I´ve learned that to forgive means to embrace and love everything that´s there, even if we didn´t choose it. I´m grateful to be able to start forgiving myself, for not always being how I want, for not feeling how I want to, for not saying something the right way or doing something the right way. And to attempt to do the same with everyone else in my life.

6. I´m grateful for technology. With all the negative impacts it has had on our culture, it connects me and all of us every single day. It allows me to share this with you, to send an email and receive it in seconds, to feel like you´re together when you physically aren´t. And I´m grateful that with all of that, it´s still a day like Thanksgiving, with its most basic elements of food and family, that is the most warm and important.

7. I´m grateful for the longing we all have. It´s a longing for freedom, for joy, to express ourselves and our most basic human nature. I´m grateful to see that no matter what we all do, no matter how misguided or lost we are, that it all stems from that longing we share. I´m grateful to see we´re all doing the best we know how in that certain moment. To love that longing and all the manifold ways it manifests itself, is to love life itself, I think.

8. I´m grateful for health, for my ability to get up in the morning without a problem, go to the bathroom, walk outside, stretch, run, jump, all without thinking twice about how incredible it all is.

9. I´m grateful for what we have...sink faucets that give us water when we need it, cupboards and markets full of food, clothes that cover us, houses that shelter us, people that surround us.

10. And the last thing I´m grateful for, is being alive. I´m grateful to be given this one chance to truly live, to express myself, with all the joy and pain that comes simultaneously. This one wild and crazy life, as Mary Oliver called it. I´m grateful to be able to honor myself, my body, my spirit, and all of you, in everything we all do, even though I´m pretty apt to forget sometimes.

Man, I wish I asked myself this question every single day!

May your Thanksgivings bring you exactly what you need :-)

Love,
Ryan